Did you get your SDL Tridion implementation right for the content authors?

I have been in multiple interviews with customers, consultants and even with SDL; and I was surprised to learn that Content Authors are still using the SDL Tridion CME, searching/tracing back the components used on pages for editing, searching/tracing back the pages in a complex hierarchy of structure group for editing, and most frustrating – change the content, publish it, wait for publishing process to finish, check on website if it is looking as expected and then repeating this process again and again in case the appearance of the change is not as expected.

When I questioned content authors – what do you think about using a WYSIWYG type editor or Experience Manager for inline editing of the pages and content or even creating new pages and content – the reaction was mixed – some were excited as they might never have heard about Experience Manager of Inline Editing in Tridion and some were not as they might have their rough experience with earlier version of inline editing tool in Tridion – SiteEdit – mostly on the performance side. However, most responses were like – “we have XPM but never seen it working” or “we are not using it”.

So, the question – Is your current SDL Tridion implementation efficient for the content author?

And another question might be asked to me – how much do you think could be the gain in efficiency by replacing traditional CME interface to XPM?

We run a survey for an implementation for a customer, whom we have upgraded to SDL Web 8.5 from SDL Tridion 2013 having a complex hierarchy of publication, component folders and structure group – and below is the kind of response we received:

At Content Bloom, we consider the XPM implementation by default to give the best value of your investment on SDL Tridion suite. Since the XPM implementation is mostly out of the box and integrated in the SDL Tridion suite itself, it would not be a huge additional effort during the build but definitely gives a huge efficiency to the content authors.